CATHOLICS AND THE SECULAR SYSTEM

New Zealand Tablet, 23 March 1911, Page 519

CATHOLICS AND THE SECULAR SYSTEM

’ - The following letter from the Right Rev. Dr. Cleary Bishop of Auckland, appeared in the Wellington Evening Dost of March 16 : Sir,— You say that the plain man does not deal in philosophies of life.’ A close perusal of the reporting and correspondence columns of your own and other newspapers, both in and out of New Zealand (not to mention other evidence in point) should suffice to convince you' that the plain man is very much given to dealing, wisely or unwisely, m views or philosophies of life. They interest him vastly. And the plain man’ or the unplain man .who does not. deal in such things is quite plainly ill-equipped for the disc^®l on a 9 ues tion which intimately involves a philosophy of life. Such a question is that of the secular school system, as opposed to religious education. Allincluding the plain man who has gone into the subject—are agreed that education _ is a preparation for life and the duties and responsibilities of life. The direction of education, its scope and aim, will thus depend upon the principles'of a philosophy of life ’—that is, upon our views of life, of its origin, its duties, its destiny. ■ Moreover, the direction given to the child’s life, his character, his ideals, will likewise depend upon these views and principles. For life-; principles, whether instilled formally or informally, directly or indirectly, day after day and year after year, enter deeply into the mind; and, constantly applied to life, they become springs of action, standards of judgment and taste and feeling Character is well described as ‘life dominated by principles, as distinguished from life dominated by mere impulses from within and mere circumstances from without, and ‘ a collection of principles covering all departments of life constitute an ideal.’ There cannot be character without some ideal. ‘Therefore,’ says the gifted author of c f lho Formation of Character, 9 * the business of training is, first, to lay before the child the best and noblest ideal; secondly, to get that ideal stamped into his mind in the concrete form of sound principles; thirdly, so firmly to establish the habit of acting according to ■ those principles that it will last for the rest of his life.’ That is education as it ought to be.. False views of life, wrong principles and low ideals, lead to a vicious educational system; this in turn, tends to issue in the formation of a debased character, to the grievous detriment of the nation; for the whole fabric of society rests upon the child. All these things the instructed ‘ plain man ’ fully realises. Now, there is no way of determining whether a system of education is beneficent or vicious, good or evil for the individual and the nation, ‘ friendly ’ or ‘ neutral ’ or ‘ impartial or hostile to religion, until we know what is its philosophy of —that is, what is its view of life, on what life-principles and life-ideals it is based. There are two views or philosophies of life which claim the child in our day, 'One of these is the old, immemorial teaching upon which the Christian home was built, and on which our Christian civilisation has arisen. It teaches that human life came from God, that its destiny is God, that this life is only a period or state of probation for the wider and deeper and truer and eternal life beyond the grave. The educational system built upon these principles presents Christ to the child as the incomparable personal Ideal and Exemplar, it seeks to create the best type of Christian manhood, fitted for this life and the next, with his physical, intellectual, emotional and ■ moral nature trained to the highest practical degree of excellence. Leaving no faculty without its due training, this system, and this system alone, deserves the title ‘comprehensive.’ • It has been in possession from time immemorial, it must be deemed to be rightly in possession until the contrary is shown. . The other system system of public instruction recent and experimental. It took its rise in ‘ French principles ’and is accepted by the Rationalist and kindred bodies in New Zealand, by the enemies of revealed religion in Europe and elsewhere, up to and including the hard materialists who look upon man as merely a highly developed and soulless chimpanzee or Barbary ape. Mutually repellent and antagonistic to each other, these protean lorms of atheism (as I may, for convenience, loosely term philosophies not admitting a personal God) base their support of the secular system on a view of life, a philosophy of * l * e * I or them there is no Personal God, no undying soul, ; no after-life. And true to their principles and ideals, - they support the purely secular system, because it treats trod and religion as trespassers on its domain, and develops (some only of) the child’s faculties, and these only for a temporal aim and ,use. The burden of justification falls upon this recent and ‘ uncomprehensiv© ’ system. As I remarked in my Pastoral Letter criticised by you the system that excludes God and religion /from the schools has been adopted and accepted in New Zealand by numbers of professed believers fin a divine revelation. Many of them counted among those who helped to banish God, by legislative enactment, from tho place which .He had occupied in our public schools till 1877. The Act of 1877 (Section 84 subsection 2) provides that the teaching shall be entirely of a secuJar character. ’ In the absence of any legal definition of the term ‘secular,’ we are bound to take it in its ordinary meaning. The ‘secular ’ Act, then requires that -the teaching shall be limited exclusively to things ‘ Der•taming to the present world,’ to ‘things not spiritual or

sacred,’ to ‘ things relating to temporal as distinguished from eternal interests.’ (1 quote from the voluminous Encyclopaedic Dictionary and from ‘Webster’s International Dictionary ’).

Now, our Christian civilisation is based upon the bedrock of faith in God and His revealed truth. We do not, indeed, always consciously act from direct and specific motives known to us by faith. But such motives are never consciously excluded and antagonised, unless when we sin. Christian views of life, Christian principles and ideals, dominate our civilisation; they enter into our legislation; they touch and penetrate our lives at ten thousand different points— fact there is no part or phase of our lives, social or commercial or otherwise, which has not a relation with them. In the Railway and Postal and Prison and other Public Departments superiors may (if they choose) appeal to the religious beliefs and instincts of refractory cadets. God is nowhere excluded by Act of Parliament, from public or private —except from the schools. These are lowered clean away out of our Christian civilisation. Inside the school and its working hours, (1) there is no God; (2) there is no moral responsibility to God; (3) there is no undying soul and no future life (4) there is nothing but facts and interests and pursuits ‘ pertaining to the present world.’ These are the only views of life, these the only ideals,' which a legislature ‘friendly’ to religion permits to be set before youth in our public schools. Christ said: ‘ Suffer little children to come to Me, and forbid them not.’ The ‘ friendlies ’ forbid Him to come to the ‘ little ones ’ in the school. They ‘sterilise’ the system against His teaching and influence; and if He enters during its working hours, He does so, like a burglar, or an ‘ undesirable alien,’ or a bubonic rat. ‘ Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But why did you kick me down stairs?’ This State philosophy, this public school creed, represents one well defined form of atheism negative form—forced upon the pupils by positive legislative enactment. The personal beliefs of the framers of our secular system are no concern of mine or yours. Neither you nor I are under any obligation to suppose that politicians act at all times consistently with their inward views of life and duty; and events of not infrequent occurrence in the legal world prove that they at times fail to realise the drift and import and true content of measures which they place upon the statute book. In the circumstances, even the intelligent ‘ plain man ’ may well be excused if he, in considerable numbers, failed to grasp the logical foundation, the true inwardness, the real trend and effect of the exclusion of religion from the public schools. lamin no way concerned here with the intimate beliefs of legislators,' but wholly and solely with the principles contained and implied in the system which they have forced upon the schools, and for which I am compelled to pay. The fundamental principles of our secular system are not one whit altered by the fact that our legislators did notas did those of France and Victoriaperpetrate the stupid and inartistic literary fraud of obliterating the name of God from the text-books used in the schools. Those precious wiseacres did not know that the printed letters ‘G. 0. T>.\ are only a symbol. A word is one thing. An idea is quite another thing. And God is not a mere word or' symbol. Our legislation has not defined or expounded the thought or idea that it attaches to the word or symbol God.’ On the contrary, it has rendered illegal all such definition or teaching or exposition in the schools. Our secular system has no God. So far as it is concerned the printed term or symbol ‘ God ’ may mean a Baal, or Mumbojumbo, a Something-in-general and Nothing-in-particular, or the empty fiction of atheistic philosophy, as M. Ferrouillat declared (February 4, 1886) it meant to him and his friends before it was blotted out of the text-books of the ‘neutral’ and ‘impartial’ schools of France. Our State school creed is in law and fact, what the French system is likewise in law and fact and (as I can show) in the admission of its highest officials: sans Dieu —that is, Godless.

■ Such is the system which its Christian supporters (with whom alone I am at present dealing) have to justifyif they can. You, or they, can defend it only n one way —by an appeal to, and justfication of, nothing less than the principles, ideals, and views of life which are implied or involved in it. To this I have challenged you. You have declined_ my challengewisely, perhaps; for a defence of such principles is a particularly ugly proposition for a professing believer in God and revealed religion. Once more, I ask you: ‘Do you object to religion in the Statesubsidised system on some principle of life-philosophy or of child-training (pedagogy) ? You may possibly plead that religion has no rightful place, or at least no necessary place, in school life, (a). If so, on what particular principles do you base such a plea? _ (b). Do these principles also require the banishment of religion from the upbringing of children in the home? ... If they do not, on what principles of life-philosophy or of education do you favor religion as a factor in the home-training of the child, and condemn religion in his school-training? Why subject youth to opposite influences in the home and in the school? And if you black-ball religion in the school on what principle do you retain it in any relation of life

The burden of proof is upon you. It is now high time for you to set forth the groundwork principles on which you are to build up your defence of the exclusion of religion from the schools. When you do so, you will at once —out of your own mouth, and from your own. presumably Christian standpointdetermine practically the whole controversy between us. You will answer, among others, the following questions: 1. Is the banishment of God and religion from the schools an act f friendly ’ or ‘ neutral ’ or ‘ impartial ’ to God and religion. You are not entitled to assume all this; you must prove it. On the face of it the system is the very reverse of neutral. And I happen to have followed the supporters of the same system in France from clamorous protestations of ‘ friendliness,’ ‘ neutrality,’ ‘ impartiality, and ‘ respect for religious beliefs,’ down through their various steps to the logical issue of the system in aggressive atheism. It is a terrible story, with, at times, a luridly blasphemous documentation. But it needs to be told. 2. Is our secular system dogmatic,’ ‘sectarian,’ and ‘ denominational ’ I hold that it is, on the face of it, and if you have the courage to accept my challenge, you yourself will furnish the further justification of my belief. 3. Your statement of principles will likewise answer the questions: Are Catholics and others justified in the opposition to the secular system ? Is the Catholic claim in education based on justice ? And now' for a protest: Why do you persistently assume, without an atom of proof, that the State has a moral right to bundle God and religion, under penalties, out of any system of education. I absolutely deny such a right, until it is clearly established. And why do you as persistently assume— without proof— unless the State itself directly teaches religion in the schools, there is no possibility of such teaching being imparted there at all ? Are you not aware of (for instance) the peaceful wedded , union of religion and education in Germany and Scandinavia — countries that lead the world by the incomparable excellence of their school systems.—Yours, etc., * HENRY W. CLEARY, D.D. ~ Bishop of Auckland. March 13.